Things I Like
-
The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?
This piece goes in depth with history and our current situation and it is so worth the time. Applebaum's writing over the past several years has continuously been good, but this piece goes so much further into how much what's going on in the US right now is akin to that which has happened before in other countries. I deeply wish it weren't so.
-
Put another way: what kind of decisions does your technical stack make about who’s allowed to contribute to the front-end? And how expensive will it be to alter those decisions, and introduce a different way of working? For many organizations, the technical barriers to cross-functional collaboration can be unacceptably high. And what’s more, the cost of that complexity is rarely acknowledged.
I think about this a lot. I recently worked on a project where the designer had our code base up and running locally and felt comfortable and preferred to do a lot of the smaller customizations of the design himself. It was amazing, we both worked to our strengths, but it's also a rarity. Our code base is difficult to run locally and not something many non engineers want to dive into (even I dislike it, to be honest). But it changed the entire tenor of the project to be able to collaborate in that way.
-
For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
Ever since the pandemic started I've been reading about supply chains, about how the things I buy get to me, about the way in which these systems feel invisible, yet they so obviously broke down quickly in the face of the lock down measures that were taken and people worrying about having enough of everything they normally eat, use, buy. Pollan speaks to how these systems are so broken. The one system that's kept going during this entire time has been my CSA, delivering me quality food every Friday, like clockwork.
-
In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.
An amazing piece on academia, fairy tales, motherhood, and life in quarantine.
-
All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one. The authenticity of our understanding must be demonstrated in our attempting to act justly even at steep cost to ourselves. We can do this as individuals and as a nation. Someday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful.
A piece that I'll need to read several times to let sink in, to think about how we're reacting to this moment and how we can learn from it.
-
This is where pandemic-induced reductions in spending, decadelong resentment over income inequality, the resurgent progressive and labor movements, sustained millennial/Gen X burnout and precarity, and burgeoning Gen Z idealism collide. What if we decided that things didn’t have to be the way they were before all of this happened? Part of that shift would involve taxing the rich and disarticulating healthcare from employment; it would involve forming and protecting unions and focusing on reimplementing regulatory systems, decentralizing production, and restoring the supply chain. And it could also mean disabusing ourselves of the idea that buying things is a solution to our problems.
Petersen talked about this in an email newsletter and it got me thinking. I've been very careful about where I spend my money for a years, not just if I'm buying now. I know, Amazon doesn't miss me or notice that I'm not spending there, but how I spend my money is one of the only ways to send signals in this society of ours. And during the pandemic, I've hardly bought a thing and I waited for my local shops to open up before getting some things I needed, like new running shoes.
-
STOP READING BOOKS THAT AREN’T DOING IT FOR YOU. SERIOUSLY. STOP.
I liked this list, I've been seeing a lot of folks saying that they're having trouble focusing during this weird time and I think this is a helpful list. The one thing I'd add to it is this: stay off line and away from the news for a day or two and see if that helps. Things are frenetic right now and the pace of news has made it harder for me to focus, so I've been staying away from it more.
-
The work itself — cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it — still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever. Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth. But maybe it’s the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors. Maybe it’s the auxiliary industries that feed off the restaurants themselves — the bloggers and agents and the “influencers,” the brand managers, the personal assistants hired just to keep you fresh on “Insta,” the Food & Wine festivals, the multitude of panels we chefs are now routinely invited to join, to offer our charming yet thoroughly unresearched opinions on.
This is an amazing essay, about so much more than one restaurant, but about what our culture around restaurants has become, about how they can survive in this world. I've read it so many times, because it's beautifully written and so much of what's said needs to be said over and over again.
-
How should we collectively record and affirm the extraordinary conditions, language, emotions, and experiences before they evaporate? And how could my own practice learn from commoning-in-crisis, and adapt to become a better model of communal care?
I heard a version of this talk last June at Eyeo, but this new version goes farther and deeper and it so worth your time. As I've said elsewhere, I've started thinking about how I'm dealing with all of this and how I'm recording it for myself, what will I share, and how I will share it.
-
Why is it, one might ask, that services such as hospitals and news organizations are closing when the public seems to need and want them most? The answer isn’t that we have bad nurses or bad reporters, or that people have turned away from medical authorities and the press has grown too liberal to gather a mass audience. The answer is that our economy had come to rest, over the years, on the cheap, endless consumption of things whose true costs were carefully hidden from us, a sleight of hand we called financialization.
Lots of good stuff in this essay, but I'm glad to see folks thinking and talking about hope and how we can find bits and pieces of it. And the added bonus of seeing some explanations for the way in which we fund the things that matter, in ways we pay for even when we don't see it, helps me explain some of what I've been feeling as an employee at a media company these days.
-
Oh, let me tell you what I see! Every day I journey to my cove, a small beach nestled into the edge of the lake. I close my eyes and listen to the waves. Their steady rhythm reminds me that some aspects of my life are untouched by the virus.
Beautiful words and pictures on the walks we take during this time. Walking and running are keeping me sane and I loved hearing about other experiences with it.
-
Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains. I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
I've spent a lot of time during this whole thing thinking about supply chains, how we buy things, why we buy things, and what I really need. It's been good in some ways, good to figure that out, and now I'm starting to think about how I want life to be whenever things move back into the public realm again, the time when I can go out more freely and do some of the things I used to do.
-
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.
This is by no means an uplifting piece to read, but what I enjoyed about it and am thinking about a lot is the way in which Packer takes our current situation and puts it in context of what's gone on so far this century in the US. On the one hand it makes me sad to read these things, but on the other hand I'm also trying to work out how we got here and how we go forward.
-
He sent some of his work in progress to friends, which led to him releasing one image of daffodils for publication, which he titled: Do Remember They Can't Cancel the Spring. He is now sharing nine more, all painted in the last few days.
Hockney is one of my favorite artists for many reasons, but one of them is how he keeps going, keeps trying new things, and keeps releasing new art. And if you want to see a good documentary on him, I just watched one on Kanopy that was fantastic.
-
Now, though, the virus has done what a revolution never could: The social order has been upended, and extroverts find themselves living in the introverts’ world. How the outgoing, the world-beaters, the Good Time Charlies and Charlenes will react is anybody’s guest, but take it from one who knows: Introversion isn’t so terrible, even with the alternately sad and horrifying news that makes introversion a societal necessity, even a matter of life and death.
This piece made me chuckle, but I also felt a sense of kinship with the writer. As an introvert that works from home even before all this, that spends a lot of time on my own with books and in the garden, it's a bit strange to not feel the low level hum of societal pressure to be doing more, going out more, and finally they way I live is the norm.